Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The Iran-China link

    From an interesting little essay by Peter Himmelman on Facebook:

    Over the past several years, and especially since October 7, 2023, I have watched something unfold that is difficult to explain, especially if you assume it emerged entirely on its own. On that day, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. Families burned alive. Young people hunted down. Children murdered and taken hostage. And yet within hours, even before the scale of the atrocity was fully understood, a counternarrative appeared.

    Israel was blamed. The victims were recast as perpetrators. The language spread with astonishing speed. Genocide. Colonialism. Resistance. These words did not emerge gradually. They arrived pre-packaged, as if they had been rehearsed and readied for a moment of maximum psychological effect.

    And then something else became visible. The language replicated.

    The same phrases appeared on handmade signs in New York and London. The same chants were heard on campuses separated by oceans. The same formulations, the same accusations, the same moral certainties, delivered with the strange precision of actors who had never met but somehow shared the same script. There was a theatrical aspect to what we were seeing.

    Not in the sense that the emotions were fake. I assume much of the vehemence was sincere. But sincerity does not preclude choreography. Actors can believe deeply in the lines they have been given. They can inhabit them fully. What was striking was the uniformity. The compression of complex history into identical slogans. The speed with which those slogans moved from iPhones to city streets.

    To understand how this happens, it helps to follow the structure that supports it.

    Last week, I listened to an important conversation between journalist Melissa Chen and Israeli historian and analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. Chen said something that clarified the geopolitical foundation beneath events that otherwise seem disconnected.

    “Iran,” she said, “is able to behave the way it does because China is willing to absorb the cost of its isolation.”

    This is not speculation, it’s is an observable economic relationship. For decades, Iran has been the subject of international sanctions intended to limit its ability to fund its military and its regional proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Those sanctions cannot achieve their intended effect if Iran continues to sell its primary export.

    Today, according to energy analysts, roughly eighty percent or more of Iran’s heavily discounted oil exports go to China. Tankers move across the sea, sometimes disabling their tracking systems. Oil is transferred ship to ship, relabeled, and sold. China receives the energy it needs to sustain its vast industrial economy. Iran receives the revenue it needs to sustain its regime. And with that revenue, Iran continues its regional project.

    Iran’s leadership has never hidden its intentions. In 2005, then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” language that has been echoed and reiterated by senior Iranian officials ever since. This objective is rooted partly in revolutionary ideology and partly in theology. In the Iranian regime’s view, Israel represents both a Western outpost and a non-Muslim sovereign presence on land they consider inherently Islamic. Its existence is seen not merely as a political problem but as a civilizational affront. This belief has practical consequences.

    Iran provides funding, weapons, and training to its proxies. They, not Iran, carry out the attacks. The attacks provoke war. The war provokes global reaction. And institutional trust across the West begins to erode.

    That chain reaction now unfolds in a digital information environment shaped heavily by platforms such as TikTok, owned by the Chinese parent company ByteDance.…

    You may not see China when Jewish students are harassed on Western campuses. You may not see Iran when protesters chant for Israel’s elimination. You may not see the economic and ideological structures that connect oil fields, social media feeds, and society-dissembling street demonstrations.

    But invisibility is essential to their function. The most effective form of influence is the one that feels like your own conclusion.

    War, it turns out, no longer requires bombs. Sometimes it requires only a story, and the patience to let others tell it for you.

  • Normalising a bizarre subculture

    Wesley Yang spells it out:

    Transgenderism is an ongoing project of attempting to normalize a bizarre subculture built around esoteric pseudo-medical practices from the outermost fringe of human extremity and make it compulsory for every American to join that subculture and to make that subculture the mainstream culture of the Western world. One requires only the most cursory understanding of the pioneering figures responsible for the mainstreaming of transgenderism — who they were and what their motives were — to understand this as a matter of certainty.

    It is as if ascetics who scourge themselves with whips in public or amputee fetishists began teaching their beliefs to young schoolchildren and recruiting them to join their ranks. One is forced into the strange position of referencing practices that are not more bizarre than transgenderism — that are indeed arguably less bizarre — to make an analogy in an attempt to restore some semblance of sanity and proportionality to our thinking about this. The normalization has already gone far enough that the whole culture suffers from vertigo where it is unable to orient itself in space or time.

    Giving the same off-label cancer drugs that are used to chemically castrate adult sex offenders to pubescent children who have been brainwashed to fear the decisive stage of mental, physical, and emotional maturation that resolves gender dysphoria in children in most cases is self-evidently an act of madness and medicalized child abuse unmatched by anything in the history of modern medicine. It took the self-lobotomization of the American professional and managerial classes for our truth-seeking apparatus not to see this fact that is self-evident to any normal person with normal human instincts.

    This self-lobotomization occurred across mainstream institutions of all kinds — all it required was the incantation of a few odious euphemisms, the manipulation of rewards and punishments, and confident claims by various authorities that self-evidently ludicrous claims were in fact settled science.

    Now we are in phase one of recognizing that there was never any science to any of it.

    It was all a lie told by cultists who managed to infiltrate and corrupt society’s knowledge-generating, certifying, and enforcement apparatus — it was the most outrageous of all such possible lies, so outrageous that nobody could believe that anyone would attempt it, much less succeed, unless there was some actual substance behind it, some real grounds for epistemic and moral confidence. There was none.

    This was prompted by Jesse Singal’s piece in the NYT yesterday on the breaking of the gender medicine consensus in the US. Yang adds this:

    Singal is still constrained to persist in the conceit that there are good faith actors who might undertake good faith research into “trans youth.” But he’s doing so largely as a rhetorical concession to make his message palatable to good liberals still unable to grasp the enormity of the con to which they’ve been party.

    And, in response to someone who argues that there are trans people “whose psychology does not align with their biological sex”:

    No there aren’t. There are people who profess in all sincerity to being happier while mimicking the other sex than before, but nothing about such claims, even if true, establishes, or ever could establish, that there are “real trans people.”

    The term is nothing more than reification into a quasi-medical framing of the normal variation in tastes and interest.

    Because gender identity is not a thing. Some people may feel more feminine, or more masculine, than gender stereotypes – many will be gay – but that doesn’t mean they’re “trans”, and need medical intervention.

  • The case of the trans newt

    Trade unions threated to cut funding for the newspaper after it published a cartoon of Stella’s which showed a crocodile claiming to be “transitioning as a newt” as it entered a pond full of newts who objected to the crocodile coming in.

    Deemed to be a transphobe, the trade union council held a meeting to force the Morning Star to cancel Stella as their political cartoonist. The paper apologised for the cartoon, put staff through retraining and were faced with potential closure for the first time in its 70 year history due to the trade unions threatening to pull funding.

    The cartoon was also reported to Avon & Somerset Police and recorded as a non-crime hate incident.

    The Free Speech Union sent a pre-action letter of defamation to the Morning Star, and a demand for an apology and right of reply to the claims made about her.

    Stella was the second women’s rights activist the Free Speech Union ever supported. Our single biggest category of cases involve people who get in trouble for expressing their gender critical views.

    It was a cartoon. Not a call to attack trans people: a cartoon. Such was the power of the gender cult on the left that she had to be punished, and reported to the police, just for making a joke about it.

  • Soviet antizionism

    The ideologues of Soviet antizionism — the “Zionologists” — operated in a Marxist-Leninist ideological context and spoke in left-wing idiom, but their personal views were informed by Russian far-right conservative thought, which had always disdained Jews. They imbibed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi theories, both of which were prohibited literature in the USSR.

    The antizionist ideology they developed for the Brezhnev regime was grounded in that antisemitic framework. They talked about Zionists, but their tropes were those of the Protocols-informed conspiracy theory.

    An easy way to understand this is to look at these two images, which I always display side by side at the beginning of my lectures and am using here for educational purposes only.

    The image on the left is the cover of a French edition of The Protocols. The image on the right is from a 1972 May Day parade in Moscow.

    Ignore the words and you can see that it’s the same image.

    Read the words, and you understand the ideological difference: One says “The Jewish danger,” and the other, “Zionism is a weapon of imperialism.”

    These images illustrate better than anything else that the only thing separating antizionism from antisemitism is that one speaks of Zionists and the other speaks of Jews.

    Underlying both is the same conspiracist belief in the omnipotence and malevolence of Jews/Zionists seeking to gain control over the world. It’s about the Jew/Zionist who is both subhuman and superpowerful. The rest is details.

    Once you understand that, it’s no longer surprising that the far left and the far right converge on the same anti-Israel and antizionist rhetoric.

    It’s precisely why the anti-Israel left suddenly finds itself nodding to Tucker Carlson and why Candace Owens can rail about Zionists without becoming a leftist.

    Soviet antizionism shows that left-wing antizionism and right-wing antisemitism share the same DNA.

    It’s precisely why antizionism is a subset of antisemitism and inseparable from it.

  • Not the firefighter but the arsonist

    And that’s before you get onto the business of what they teach in UNRWA schools.

  • Lea Valley

    Round Walthamstow Wetlands this morning:

  • Wes Streeting’s cowardice

    Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:

    One of the shocking things that happened when the news broke that the controversial Pathways trial assessing the effect of puberty blockers on children was to be halted was that no one had bothered to tell Dr Hilary Cass….

    The Pathways trial – ignominiously dubbed the “Streeting trial” by shadow health minister and consultant paediatrician Dr Caroline Johnson – was stopped by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) over “fresh” concerns about how these powerful drugs may harm children in the long term. Cass was being interviewed on Radio New Zealand when the announcement was made. She seemed to have had no forearming from Streeting. She averred that it was “something to do with technical details being ironed out”, suggesting still that the trial was basically sound.

    Actually, far from it: the MHRA recommendation that children could not consent to having their puberty blocked at eight, and instead had to be 14 to participate, effectively kiboshes the trial because most girls will have reached puberty by then.

    Has Streeting used Cass as a political pawn since the report was published, to use her as a fall guy to mask his own failures of leadership? Many of us never understood why this trial had to happen in the first place, unless it was a sop to trans activists and an attempt to push this issue into the long grass.

    We already know from countless studies what puberty blockers do: they affect bone density as well as cognitive development. They may cause vaginal bleeding in very young girls. But the main issue is that they are not taken in a vacuum. They nearly always lead on to cross-sex hormones. They are a fast-track to medicalising a child forever.

    No new evidence caused the MHRA to pull the trial back. Rather, they got cold feet about the age of the children involved when it came to the trial protocol that meant asking them about “fertility preservation”. Are you really going to ask small girls who have never had a period about “egg retrieval” for freezing? Are you going to ask young boys about sperm donation before you set them on a path to future infertility? How can a child consent to this?…

    Both Cass and Streeting speak of the demand from children and their families for these drugs, as though that in itself justifies the risks. We know that around 2,000 children went on blockers after being referred by the Tavistock gender identity clinic… before the NHS banned the drugs following Cass’s findings. The Tavistock failed to track the long-term medical outcomes of these children; furthermore, most NHS Trusts that ran adult gender identity clinics would not share their clinical data with Cass.

    It is crazy that a new cohort of kids must be experimented on. As soon as the public began to understand this, they were appalled. None of this, by the way, is about the rights of adults to transition or present as they like. This is an issue about the safeguarding of children, a concept that gender ideology regards as utterly disposable.

    Fundamentally, this is a moral judgement – and one that Wes Streeting has failed to get right. He has admitted that he felt “discomfort” about the trial but that’s not good enough.

    As Health Secretary, he should have stepped in to prevent it. Cass is not a political animal, so it would come as no surprise if she felt compelled to appease the trans mob (she was subject to horrible threats by them, remember) with the concession of a puberty blockers trial. But if she could not stand up to the activists, then Streeting should have done.

    But he was intimidated. He thought the trial might get the trans activists – not least the trans activists in the Labour Party – off his back. Not a good look for a prospective leader.

  • Homophobia on steroids

  • Corbyn blood libel

    He finally got there.

  • The Zero Line

    From the BBC:

    Four Russian soldiers have exposed the horror and brutality of conditions on their side of the front lines in Ukraine, with two men telling the BBC they saw soldiers being executed on the spot for refusing orders.

    One man told a documentary team he saw a soldier executed on the order of his commander, who was made a “Hero of Russia” in 2024.

    “I see it – just two metres, three metres… click, clack, bang,” he said.

    Another soldier, from a different unit, says he saw his commander shoot four men himself.

    “I knew them,” he says of the soldiers executed. “I remember one of them screaming ‘Don’t shoot, I’ll do anything!’”

    One of them also says he saw 20 bodies of fellow soldiers lying in a pit after being “zeroed” by comrades. The term “zero” is Russian military slang for executing your own.

    In the documentary, The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War, men give detailed accounts about how they were tortured for refusing to take part in assaults they describe as verging on suicide missions. Russian troops call these attacks “meat storms” as waves of men are sent across the front line relentlessly to try and wear down Ukrainian forces.

    For the first time, the BBC believes, Russian soldiers from the front line say on the record how they witnessed commanders ordering executions of their own men.

    The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War is on BBC iPlayer, and shows on BBC2 tonight at 9.